good night room
goodnight nom de plume
goodnight notebooks
goodnight tests
goodnight grants
goodnight Mike and goodnight Ike
goodnight publish
and goodnight perish
goodnight whiteboard
goodnight star, goodnight air
goodnight noises everywhere.
Dave, after getting a degree in particle theory, I ended up (for awhile) in what any objective observer would rate the worst-job ever … harvesting cadaver parts in the mornings … as an unpaid volunteer … purely to earn the privilege of writing medical research proposals (on-spec) in the evenings.
However! … taking the challenge of medical research seriously did eventually lead (what else?) quantum physics. And so that at-first unappetizing job turned out (in the long run) to be, in multiple respects, the *BEST* job ever.
That is why … very seriously … it is my considered opinion that no matter *what* projects you work on at Google … so long as those projects serve Google’s admirable mission “to facilitate access to information for the entire world” …
… then you will assuredly find yourself (in the long run) still doing QIT.
Because by the end of the story, pretty much any challenge that is associated to information ends up being associated to QIT … provided that you conceive QIT broadly.
Therefore, both my best wishes and my whole-hearted confidence in a wonderful future, are extended to you and to the entire Bacon family!
Yeah, that’s a wonderful book, almost as good as Mike and Ike. Of those two books, Goodnight Moon is the only one I read to my kids. Like this post, it makes me cry.
It’s just another melancholy Friidayy.
John – Your comment made my day. Of course, I suppose it’s possible that if you had read Mike and Ike to your kids it would have made them cry.
Well, I told my sophomore class about qubits and decoherence (single-qubit channels, though I didn’t use those words), and elicited a strong emotional reaction from some of them.
I got all emotional and tingly. We’ll miss you.
Dave, wonderful post!
Michael, I’ve *tried* reading Mike and Ike to my kids to get them to sleep, all that happens is they look at you for a while to see if you’re going to get to the good bits (with rhyming, or possibly dinosaurs) and when you don’t they just pile on top of you giggling.
So not the best bed-time book, but nonetheless very good…
Sadness, anger, admiration, envy …
montaged with flashing memories of our shared time at IQI….
That was the mixed state of my heart when
struck by the wave function of your decoherence.
At last, I managed to distill some
happiness, as I realized that your decoherence is, in fact, an
overflow of you into the environment, reaching as far as
Beijing, where I am visiting.
You haven’t decohered, Dave,
you are simply acting on a
bigger space, demonstrating the
nonlocal beauty
a life could be….